Personation

The portrayal of alien personalities by a temporary assumption of their bodily and mental characteristics. It is a frequent psychical phenomenon and differs from trance possession in that it does not necessarily involve a loss of consciousness or personal identity.

Personation is an impressive indication of the communicator's identity. It is an indication rather than proof, as experiments in hypnotism suggest the need for careful consideration in attributing the phenomena of personation to an outside intelligence. Under the effect of suggestion, the subconscious displays surprising histrionic abilities. The hypnotized subject is not only capable of successfully imitating any suggested personality, but may even sometimes take on animal similitudes. Charles Richet hypnotized a friend and suggested that he was a parrot. Richet asked him: "Why do you look preoccupied?" The friend answered: "How can I eat the seed in my cage?"

Richet compared the phenomenon of personation to crystallization from a saturated solution. Remembrances and emotions concentrate upon the personality invented like crystals form around a center.

Frank Podmore, in Modern Spiritualism (1902), quoted a curious instance of personation verging on possession in which the subject of personation was alive.

A Miss A. B. had a passionate love affair with a young man, C. D., and continued to cherish the belief, even after the young man broke off the relationship that he was still profoundly attached to her. "A few weeks after the breach she felt one evening a curious feeling in the throat, as of choking, the prelude probably, under ordinary circumstances to an attack of hysteria. This feeling was succeeded by involuntary movements of the hands and a fit of long-continued and apparently causeless sobbing. Then, in the presence of a member of her family she became, in her own belief, possessed by the spirit of C. D., personating his words and gestures and speaking in his character. After this date she continually held conversation, as she believes, with C. D.'s spirit; 'he' sometimes speaking aloud through her mouth, sometimes conversing with her in the inner voice. Occasionally 'he' wrote messages through her hand, and I have the testimony of a member of her family that the writing so produced resembled that of C. D. Occasionally also, A. B. had visions in which she claimed to see C. D. and what he was doing at the moment. At other times she professed to hear him speaking or to understand by some inner sympathy his feelings and his thoughts." Podmore believed the phenomena to be a delusion.

An account of personation experiences was rendered by Charles Hill-Tout, principal of Buckland College, Vancouver, Canada, in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. 11, pp. 309-16). On one occasion, during a séance, he was oppressed by a feeling of coldness and loneliness, as of a recently disembodied spirit. His misery was terrible, and he was only kept from falling to the floor by some of the other sitters. At this point one of the sitters

"… made the remark, which I remember to have overheard 'It is father controlling him,' and I then seemed to realise who I was and whom I was seeking. I began to be distressed in my lungs, and should have fallen if they had not held me by the hands and let me back gently upon the floor. As my head sunk back upon the carpet I experienced dreadful distress in my lungs and could not breathe. I made signs to them to put something under my head. They immediately put the sofa cushion under me, but this was not sufficient—I was not raised high enough yet to breathe easily—and they then added a pillow. I have the most distinct recollection of a sigh of relief I now gave as I sank back like a sick, weak person upon the cool pillow. I was in a measure still conscious of my actions, though not of my surroundings, and I have a clear memory of seeing myself in the character of my dying father lying in the bed and in the room in which he died. It was a most curious sensation. I saw his shrunken hands and face and lived again through his dying moments; only now I was both myself—in some distinct sort of way—and my father, with his feelings and appearance."

The flaw, from the viewpoint of the theory of an extraneous influence, is that Hill-Tout personated his own father with whose circumstances of death he must have been familiar. But many mediums reenact the death-bed scenes of people they have never heard of and furnish, in the process, evidential details. This was a feature of the mediumship of a Mrs. Newell of Lancashire, England. As a rule such re-enactments were accompanied by great suffering. The medium seemed to experience the symptoms of illness and the agonies of dying.

The American medium Mrs. J. H. Conant, was recorded once to have shown the signs of hydrophobia; she foamed at the mouth and snapped at the sitters. The man whom she personated had died from the bite of a mad dog.

People who practice pychometry also exhibit this curious phenomenon. The object which they hold as a clue may establish a community of sensation with both men and beasts. Mrs. Denton, in describing her impressions from a fragment of mastodon tooth felt herself to be in the body of the monster, although she could not very well personate it. Personation of a dying animal, through telepathy, was illustrated by the vivid dream of the novelist H. Rider Haggard on the night when his dog Bob was struck and killed by a train.

If the assumption of the bodily characteristics of the departed is effected by the adaptation of ectoplasm, as in materialization séances, the case is known as transfiguration.

(See also personality ; trance personalities )